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GONE

Name: GONE
Author: Kit Craig
ISBN: 0-316-15923-9

by Kit Craig ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1992

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Psychothriller by first-novelist Craig sustained throughout by rich stylization. Craig starts off with a literary bang, introducing her plot as indirectly as Faulkner introduces Popeye's rape of Temple Drake in Sanctuary—and in nearly as high-flown a voice as Faulkner's. Can Craig go the distance at this level? Well, the fine vocalizing never stops, but the plot at last turns on the familiar villainies of the obsessive psychopath we first met in Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. Harris's serial murderer identified with Blake's drawing of Lucifer; Craig's magnetically handsome killer (who kills by the family) is crazed by a tree of rage he believes is growing within him and whose image he's been carving in scar tissue on his body—a fact telegraphed about half-way through the novel. Clarada Hale, a Navy widow with three kids, has been waiting for four years for her MIA submariner husband to return from the dead. Instead, a figure from her past reappears and kidnaps her: Cleve Morrow, a prodigy who loved Clary but murdered her parents when she was 17, was put into a mental institution and there educated himself in criminal law, anatomy, and whatnot. Now, like De Niro in Cape Fear, he's back. The story, though, is told largely through the eyes of Clary's kids—Teah, 16, Michael, 15, and Tommy, a toddler—who find themselves alone in their house one morning. Where's mother? Gone??? They can't believe it and keep house for themselves for nearly a week awaiting her return, get drunk, and reduce the place to a stinking pigsty. Clues arise that get them to drive down the East Coast in search of Mom and toward the fated meeting with Cleve and his prisoner Clary, with an inescapable final chase of the family through the Florida jungle. A debut that should be a big hit and begs for film.

Pub Date: July 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-316-15923-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
Salinger Focus of NYPL Exhibit

- SEEN & HEARD
NYC Mayoral Candidates Name Favorite Gotham Books

- APPRECIATIONS
Holden Caulfield: Forever Young

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JURASSIC PARK

by Michael Crichton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1990

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Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.